This invention relates to a spiral pipe machine that can produce pipes at various locations.
Spiral pipe machines have been widely used for producing corrugated lockseam pipes and smooth welded seam pipes. These machines are most commonly found at factories throughout the country in locations within a two hundred mile radius of where the pipes produced will be used. These machines produce pipes from raw material of steel sheet in coil form. Common thickness of raw material ranges from 1 mm to 25 mm and common widths range from 0.5 meter to 1.5 meter with a typical coil weight of 10 tons. Pipes are produced on these machines in a range of sizes from 0.3 meter to 3.6 meter diameter and in lengths up to 12 meter. Spiral pipe machines all have in common equipment for uncoiling coils into sheet form, then feeding the sheet into a spiral pipe forming assembly and then onto a pipe support. Spiral pipe forming assemblies use lockseaming, welding or both to join material edges. Prior attempts were made to allow for spiral pipe machines to be transported to various locations for producing pipes. These machines had various disadvantages. One major difficulty is that these pipe machines required an electrical power source at the location they were traveling to, thus requiring a large generator or electrical hookup at location. Also ability to remove coils of raw materials from delivery vehicles and install the coil onto the uncoiler was not considered, thus requiring a special fork lift or some other type of equipment to perform this function at location. Another problem could be found in the fact that by using basically the same machines as they would use in factory installation, these machines required very specialized trailers to allow for manufacturing set up and in the case of larger machines special outriggers were required for stability, this also meant that these machines were not readily transportable. Because these machines were of standard factory machine height, the operator of the machine would need to stand on top of the customized trailer arrangement in order to operate the controls. Which was a safety concern. Since these machines were basically the same as the factory installed models, they were built with the same diameter and length capacities. One result being that only short lengths of pipe could be produced, longer lengths still required couplings.